You are a carbon atom moving through the air, living things, the ocean, and deep underground. Click a zone to begin, then choose a pathway at each stop to watch carbon transfer between reservoirs along fast and slow routes.
How do I explore?
Pick Explore to travel freely, or pick Challenge to try set goals. Click any zone to start. At each zone, click a pathway to move to the next place.
What should I do/notice?
- Each zone shows how much carbon it stores in Carbon Units (CU).
- Watch the numbers rise and fall as you move carbon from one zone to another.
- Green Fast pathways take years. Yellow Slow pathways take millions of years.
- Notice which zones hold the most carbon and which hold the least.
What about the data?
Click Collect Data to send your path to Tuva. Each step you took becomes one row you can graph.
Accessibility
Press Tab to move between the buttons and pathway choices on the screen. Press Enter or Space to pick one. Press Escape to close this window.
You are a carbon atom moving through the air, living things, the ocean, and deep underground. Click a zone to begin, then choose a pathway at each stop to watch carbon transfer between reservoirs along fast and slow routes.
Standards
FL SC.8.L.18.3Construct a scientific model of the carbon cycle to show how matter and energy are continuously transferred within and between organisms and their physical environment.
Design intent
- Students ride a single carbon atom and choose a pathway at each reservoir, building the cycle one transfer at a time.
- Each move shifts carbon from one reservoir to another, so students see matter transferred between organisms and the physical environment.
- A Fast or Slow lane on each pathway contrasts biological timescales in years with geological timescales in millions of years.
Discussion prompts
- Why must carbon pass through Land Plants before it can reach Land Animals?
- What would happen to the Atmosphere if photosynthesis stopped?
- Which pathways move carbon into the ocean, and which move it back out?
- Why do the Slow lane pathways take so much longer than the Fast lane ones?
Data format
Each Collect Data adds one row for each step taken since the last collect. A row records the Journey, Step, From Reservoir, To Reservoir, Process, Time (years), Lane, Transfer CU, and the carbon stored in all seven reservoirs after the move.
Try a bar graph of Time (years) grouped by Lane to compare fast and slow processes.
Model details
Starting levels in Carbon Units reflect the relative sizes of Earth's real reservoirs: Atmosphere 8,000, Land Plants 5,000, Land Animals 20, Soil and Decomposers 18,000, Ocean Surface 9,000, Deep Ocean 370,000, and Deep Earth 600,000,000.
Pathways follow real processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, diffusion, decomposition, sinking, upwelling, burial, and volcanic release. Fast pathways elapse over years to about a thousand years; Slow pathways elapse over about a million years.
Simplifications:
- Carbon Units are a relative measure scaled for play, not real-world gigatons.
- Transfer amounts for small reservoirs such as Land Animals are adjusted to prevent depletion during normal play.
- The Fast and Slow labels compress a broad range of timescales into two categories.
- Deep Earth is treated as effectively immovable; its slow outflow pathways are negligible on human timescales.
- The ocean is split into Surface and Deep zones to highlight the biological pump and upwelling.